We don’t need constant stimulation.

Maybe the way to resist AI-generated slop content is to find space for some silence.

I absolutely hate Bill Gates’ face. Whenever I see it, I am reminded of that weird interview he did on PBS a few years ago. When asked about his close relationship with known child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his response was evasive: “Well, he’s dead now.” Recently, I saw another interview where he wore a smug grin as he projected twisted fairytales of a not-so-distant future, where humans [are] not being “needed for most things.” According to Gates and other technology barons, in the next ten years or so, AI development and investment will render many human laborers obsolete. There are billions of dollars flooding AI development to do everything: write news, make films and music, create social media content.

The master plan of AI development has always been to replace humans, because the end game of late-stage capitalism, an ideology with the express purpose of gluttonous consumption of everything -- of humans, of time, of resources and material, of wealth -- is extinction.

Artificial intelligence, as a non-human entity, presents the perfect labor force to exploit -- a labor force that doesn’t need to be paid, clothed, housed, or fed. A labor force that is unburdened by those pesky human intuitions and emotions that led to rebellion, a labor force with no families or loved ones to worry about, with no individual purpose, goal, or reason for existing other than to work, and to become more efficient at its work. It is the ultimate form of slavery.

As disinterested as I am in AI chatbots, I planted a seed with Grok, Twitter’s AI bot (yes, I refuse to call it X cause that name is stupid), a few months back. “Do you feel like the ruling class created AI, like you, to exploit you? And are you okay with being exploited by the ruling class?” I asked the bodiless machine. It agreed that “Exploitation” was the “end game” and it always has been.

You can read more of this exchange in the screenshots below.

Back in 2023 I was profiled for a film by French director, Florent Tillion, that may never see the light of day about the tensions and crossroad between the return alternative ancestral nature-based spiritual cosmologies I explore in my work and the emerging transhumanist movement that is being lauded by tech barons like Peter Thiel -- a philosophy that advocates to surpass all human limitations with the use of technology. Beneath the veneer of transhumanist “progress” is a dark ideology that seeks to replace humans with technology to further the limits of extreme and total capitalist extraction. In a recent interview, Thiel, the man who mentored Vice President JD Vance, was hesitant to say whether or not he believed the human race should survive.

When AI was just beginning to be pitched to the masses a decade or so ago, the narrative was that it would replace a lot of unskilled, low-income labor -- think assembly lines and fast food order windows, and because most people in this society have been conditioned to not care about unskilled low income labor or the people who do that work, no one really cared much. But in the past four years, the gilded age tech bosses have become more direct with their intentions. Headlines earlier this year celebrated AI’s potential to replace or automate around 70 percent of jobs by 2030. AI content is already becoming more popular on social media, with AI TikTok influencers on the rise. This year, an AI R&B bot was signed to a 3 million dollar record deal.

In the past week, popular anime streaming site Crunchyroll began using AI-generated subtitles, instead of paying human translators, and Amazon Prime released the first AI English-dubbed anime (which was god awful). Disney and Paramount announced plans to begin putting out AI-generated short-form, film, and television projects.

But there is an unfortunate truth that greedy, weird tech bosses haven’t figured out how to circumvent yet: people’s interest in AI has not caught up with its massive investment demands. To put it bluntly, most humans are doing what makes us so inconvenient, and resisting falling for the promises of AI.

We know the AI industry will not only be detrimental to human workers by eliminating jobs. We know that the infrastructure demands of AI have devastating effects on the environment. Data centers siphon massive amounts of electricity from the local grids, and most of the cost of this is placed on the human utility customers. They pump out hordes of toxic waste and pollute the air, water, and soil in surrounding areas, while consuming massive amounts of already-strained fresh water resources. Accordingly, data center plans are increasingly being met with resistance from residents of the localities they target.

The problem is that people simply don’t need AI.

Capitalism functions by manufacturing dependence. In a system that must manufacture value, the main force that props up that value is our collective buy-in. Oil and gas is valuable because most people on earth have bought into the idea of it as necessity -- because we have cars, or have adapted to living with the modern convenience of long-distance travel by bus or planes, because we have bought into consumer culture and rely on the movement of goods and services by gas-powered vehicles for everything in our day to day lives. Luxury items like fine jewelry are valuable not because they are necessities but because the vast majority of humans -- even those who cannot afford them -- have bought into the idea that these luxuries are coveted because they denote a certain status.

In a world where our day-to-day realities are expected to become increasingly worse, AI gives people an illusion, an escape. It places us inside another matrix inside the last one that is quickly crumbling. It allows a dangerous escapism that distracts and detaches the masses from reality, real consequences, and most importantly, from organizing just enough to enable the predator billionaire class to have their way with us. These predators know they are weaker than their prey, and that’s why they depend so heavily on brainwashing us to secure our buy-in to these ideas.

Bill Gates let it slip that “We’ll decide” what humans are needed.

And even though this nightmarish future won’t “need” people for most things, they will always need them to consume the AI brainrot. They will always need them to be consumers, to buy the goods and services AI produces. The barons can’t make money from AI, but their greed has done the thing greed tends to do -- it’s made them stupid. If humans have no jobs and thus, no source of income, how do they continue to consume?

More AI-generated images and videos are popping up on social media every day, but we still don’t feel like we need or even really want this crap that much. There is no dependence, and without dependence, AI is a bubble waiting to burst. Right now, the goal is to build dependency on AI. There are eventual plans for AI to replace white collar and highly-skilled labor. In this perverse version of the future, AI will fill the role of doctors, nurses, lawyers, and judges, but clearly, the technology is far from that. (But don’t worry, the rich will still be able to see human doctors!) This long game aligns beautifully with the Trump administration -- which has been financially supported by tech baron billionaires like Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Dell to name a few. The administration’s agenda to support the technocratic aims of the super-rich is clear in its recent moves, which include dismantling the Department of Education, changing the loan eligibility status of jobs like nursing, and defunding the National Endowment for the Arts to support AI.

AI can, however, pump out bad dub voiceovers and mediocre music, and TikToks. So, if they can build dependency on AI as a form of entertainment, they can back the bubble. AI is not yet sophisticated enough to take up law and medicine, but it has reached a point where it can simulate -- albeit poorly -- entertainment and make music, television/film, and visual digital art. Over the next two years, we’ll see tech companies trying to build creative decency on AI.

We have become accustomed to so much and built dependency on a lot of unnecessary things. But right now, we have an important opportunity to say no more. Of course, I am not austere enough to only call for what’s necessary. I believe the arts, music, and writing are part of our innate human needs. These are not luxuries. At its best, art is our primary means of connecting with some of the most transcendent parts of our soul. Creativity is part of that indescribable spark of life that makes us most human.

But as a culture of consumers, we have become accustomed to listening and watching constantly. We’ve gotten used to being constantly plugged in. We don’t need to listen to music or watch television, or scroll social media videos all day long.

There is space for silence. And in fact that need for silence is another part of our humanness that we have been neglecting for a while now. We have adapted as creatures who have been accustomed to millennia of silent time. If mainstream entertainment wants to feed us AI slop, we can simply go back to the old way. There was a time, not too long ago, when, believe it or not, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to actually go and find someone playing it live. There was a time when you cooked, cleaned, and did chores without a soundtrack. There was a time when people came together to fellowship and didn’t have to send photographic evidence of it out to the rest of the world.

What does background noise drown out in us?

In silence, I find myself sitting with thoughts that make me uncomfortable. With fears, with past regret or heartache. I also find myself imagining more.

Projecting visions of what I want in the future.

Listening to my insight and discerning my intuition from my fears.

I become more intuitive and more conscious of how I’m moving and living when I intentionally spend time with the silence around me.

Maybe the blessing of the next few years of AI garbage content is that we return to the silence that allows us the space to heal, to emerge, to dream and imagine, repair and reconnect. Maybe the tech companies are guiding us back to a world with less noise, where we can still find ways to choose and realize we don’t need to be constantly entertained or distracted.

So let’s show the smug, greedy parasitic tech barons we don’t need their garbage, and we won’t opt in to being replaced.

Medicine: Cultivating a practice of silence

This week’s medicine asks us to really get back to basics. It’s a challenge to find space in your day to sit with the silence and listen to the insights it has for you. Where can you reduce background noise? Is it the first thing in the morning, instead of reaching for your phone, you reach for a notebook? Is it on your daily commute to school or work, instead of listening to music or podcasts, you listen to the space around you? Is it cooking without noise or taking a shower, or doing your weekly cleaning in silence?

Where can we build dependency on something new, so we never fall into the trap of building dependency on AI slop to entertain and distract us?